Between History and Transcendence: Padre Guadalupe Carney and the struggle for Agrarian Reform in Honduras

Abstract

During the late Cold War in Central America, priest James Hanley Carney wrote a book that was at once his life story and a detailed chronicle of the campesino movement in Honduras. This essay examines and contextualizes the contents of Carney’s autobiography while simultaneously reflecting upon the ideology encoded in the autobiographic genre. His autobiography and the letters that he wrote to his family, along with documents from the Honduran campesino and workers’ movements, demonstrate that it was the poor of Honduras who converted Carney, and not he who converted them. His attempt to understand the campesinos with whom he lived and worked prompted him to question the historical and structural conditions of their poverty. This extended encounter led him to rethink his anticommunist faith and his Christian commitments.